I wish…

One doesn’t have to be a Trump voter to think openly discussing murder is not okay. Especially because normalizing murder of one’s political opponents plays right into right wing extremists’ hands.

Even worse: with an odd number of sides, there are cases where none is up.

That‘s the reason for elderly French pirate. The people involved didn’t just disappear because privateering ended.

Anyone upset that xkcd is supporting Harris probably hasn’t been paying attention for the last 19 years. I wonder if this header image is a foreshadowing for XKCD 3000 (!) tomorrow.

There is definitely a large difference between ABS-like resins and flexible resins. The latter are much closer in consistency to the miniatures you get for example from CMON board games. I have some printed miniatures with swords and spears and I can easily bend those weapons 20-30° without breaking them which in my opinion is a huge plus for things that get handled a lot.

Sources on literacy in Medieval Europe seem to be all over the place, reaching from the popular “Almost nobody could even sign their name” to “There was at least one person in most households who could read and write”. Here’s a discussion on Stackexchange that lists some sources.

The sad truth is, we may never know how literate people actually were. We can be relatively sure that especially poor people didn’t have any formal education and couldn’t afford expensive handwritten books. But that doesn’t necessarily mean people couldn’t read and write at all. A basic level of literacy was useful for a lot of people, especially craftsmen and traders. Not so much that they’d read and write whole books but enough for basic bookkeeping or passing notes to someone who lives in a neighboring village. The thing is, those are not the kind of things that would be preserved until today. Paper and parchment were too expensive for such trivialities but we have evidence from Russia that people wrote everyday correspondence on birch bark. With no need to store these writings, most people would have probably just reused whatever they were written on to light fires or just thrown them outside where they would decompose within a few weeks.

(this kind of ties into a fun fact about why so few authentic chainmail shirts have survived until today. Not because they got destroyed by rust but because after they lost their usefulness in early modern times, they were cut up and reused to scrub pots)